The Social Part May Be Outdated Soon

Image via CrunchBase

It is, or will be pretty soon, arguable that Facebook has peaked. Yet many phones designed in the last two years have Facebook as a central part of their strategy. Sure they include Twitter functionality as well, and maybe other sites as well, but Facebook is always at the top of the list. But as we see, the popularity of sites changes. Friendster peaked, Orkut peaked, so many were hot and peaked and then all their users moved on.

It takes a year or more to design a good phone interface, and in that time the hot site your phone is trying to be a conduit for could be out of favor. There goes your fashionable phone -- unless you commit to a design that allows multiple conduits and either letting 3d parties develop these conduits for the new hot sites or having an in-house team that keeps building them.

Meanwhile, it took a number of tries to configure my wireless access point in my reception to share the networking it receives from my office wirless LAN over its single ethernet jack so I could connect my television. Yes, my new television wants to be on the Internet, not something I would thought I would ever say 10 years ago. It took me an hour to find out between all the manufacturers how this should be properly done. How do people without degrees in Computer Science do this? Still, I can now display my flickr stream as a slideshow.